Facts

Tuesday morning, what detectives hope will be the key to the Walker family murders was pulled from the cold ground of Mount Muncie Cemetery.

Sarasota detectives arrived in Lansing on Sunday, in time for a Leavenworth County judge to sign an exhumation order on Monday. The order cleared the way for Florida and Kansas authorities to dig up the bodies of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, collecting DNA evidence that could link the men — the central characters of Truman Capote's true-crime classic "In Cold Blood" — to the murders of an Osprey rancher, his wife and their two children. The Walker slayings took place 53 years ago today.

Investigators would not specify what they removed from the coffins, and said it would take weeks to determine if they have a match.

Capote's book depicts how Smith and Hickock killed another family, the Clutters, in Holcomb, Kan., and were executed in 1965.

The two criminals traveled through Florida a month after killing the Clutters. While the killers were traveling through the Sunshine State, Sarasota detectives found Cliff Walker, his wife, Christine, and their two toddlers shot in their home on Dec. 19, 1959.

Although the criminals claimed they were in Tallahassee at the time, detectives discovered that this alibi — the same version Capote later published — did not match evidence from records and witness testimony. Multiple witnesses also claimed they spotted Smith and Hickock in Sarasota and DeSoto counties around the time of the murders.

But Smith and Hickock were dismissed as suspects several months into the Walker murder investigation, based on fingerprint and polygraph evidence. The detectives moved on to other suspects, most of whom had ties to the Walker family.

Now, a Sarasota detective, Kimberly McGath, is raising questions about an unidentified palm print from the Walker home, and about the results of the polygraph tests done on Hickock and Smith.

McGath hopes DNA from semen left at the Walker home matches a sample pulled from a bone in one of the killers' coffins. A match could provide a long-sought answer to one of Sarasota County's most enduring mysteries.

"We're glad everything is proceeding," said Wendy Rose, spokeswoman for the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. "We are hoping it will lead to some results."

A quiet hilltop

The entrance to the cemetery was barricaded by Lansing Police Tuesday morning during the exhumation, limiting the access to the media and the public.

Police at the sceney handed anyone with questions a prepared statement from the cemetery, to explain the closure and apologize for the inconvenience.

Kyle Smith, deputy director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, said the KBI treated the exhumation as a crime scene, and wanted to control the area out of respect for families with loved ones buried in the cemetery.

Delaying the exhumation could have made the process more difficult, with the threat of cold winds and snow. But on this clear, warm December day, that problem was avoided.

Smith said the samples taken during the exhumation will be analyzed at a Kansas lab because they were collected under a Kansas search warrant.

"We are analyzing it as evidence of a crime, however that crime occurred in another jurisdiction. We are assisting the Sarasota, Fla., Sheriff's Office with evidence in our custody."

He declined to say what kind of bones were taken from the bodies to extract DNA, but said generally with older bodies it would be larger bones from a leg or hip.

The DNA analysis and comparison will take time.

"Ideally, the earliest is in a couple of weeks," Smith said.

Still, high hopes aside, the exhumation does not assure that the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office will get the evidence it needs for a DNA comparison.

"It's possible that you might be getting something useful from the bodies, but it's not guaranteed," said Dr. Erik Mitchell, the coroner for Leavenworth County.

Even if analysts find viable DNA, there is always the chance that the material from the Walker murder scene will not match Smith or Hickock.

A Hitchcock night

The two killers were hanged in a Lansing prison warehouse on April 14, 1965, after five years of appealing the death sentence they received for murdering the Clutter family.

The death row cells where Smith and Hickock waited, stalling their gallows appointments and talking with Capote, no longer exist. The building was torn down years ago, although the razor-wire still encloses one of Leavenworth County's four major prisons.

The prison warehouse is still standing, though a new storage room and stacked furniture inside give no indication of the gallows that once loomed in a corner. The undertaker, Davis Moulden, was still in mortuary school when he saw Smith and Hickock hang there.

"I had never been to an execution," said Moulden, the 84-year-old funeral director of Davis Funeral Chapel, a Leavenworth family business since 1855. Capote also was among the guards, officials and reporters who all witnessed Smith and Hickock's execution.

Sitting on a couch in the foyer as funeral bells chimed, Moulden remembered the heavy mist that rolled in on the night of the execution, not the downpours in the 1967 "In Cold Blood" movie. "It looked like an Alfred Hitchcock night," Moulden said.

Moulden parked a Buick hearse by the wall of the warehouse as a prison car drove by carrying Hickock, bareheaded and seated between two prison guards in the backseat.

"I had the parking lights on," Moulden recalls. "Whether or not Hickock saw that hearse nobody will ever know."

The car pulled up to the warehouse. Later, the executioner pulled the lever that triggered the hanging.

"We heard the trap open up, it was very loud," Moulden said. "And Hickock went down."

Moulden helped pull a funeral cot behind Hickock's body while a guard cut the rope around his neck. They moved the cot into the hearse and Moulden drove a few miles down the road to the funeral chapel in Leavenworth.

With no partition between the front seat and the back of the hearse, Moulden recalled that Hickock's feet were just behind his own head. At the parlor, a doctor arrived to remove Hickock's corneas, which he had asked to donate.

The bodies, unclaimed by the families, were placed in "plain Jane" coffins paid for by the state. The state also bought the plots in the so-called "singles section."

"I think that family needs some closure, the one in Florida," Moulden said. "If that means digging them up to get DNA, then I think they should."

'A good salesman'

The exhumation was not the first time the killers' graves have been disturbed.

In the 1980s, the embedded, flat headstones that Capote had bought the men were stolen on a lark from the small plots they marked in Mount Muncie Cemetery. The replacement stones where encased in a concrete base.

Twenty years later, a KBI agent heard that the original markers were being used as stepping stones leading to an old farm shed. After brushing the snow off the stones, the agents pried them from the frozen ground in Iola, Kan.

The recovered stones were turned over to the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka, which briefly displayed them before surviving members of the Clutter family objected and asked that the display be removed. The museum also has the dismantled gallows, an item hidden in its collection.

Nearly 400 miles west of Lansing, the murder of wealthy farmer Herb Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and two children has faded from many memories, with old people gone and new people moving into Finney County. But they are often reminded it is the setting for "In Cold Blood," a story that has reverberated for decades and extended far beyond Kansas.

While traveling in Indonesia with his wife, longtime Garden City resident Duane West, now 81, met a man from Australia at a museum.

"He told us, 'The only thing I knew about Kansas was 'In Cold Blood,'" West said.

Pulling out his business card — "Duane West, attorney-at-law" — West explained he was the chief prosecutor for the trial.

"There's lots of things I disagree with, but I have to give him credit for being a good salesman," West said, referring to Truman Capote. "I think it's stupid to have all these English departments require reading it; Harper Lee's book \ is the one they should read."

West was the person who decided to ask Smith and Hickock's jury for the death penalty.

If exhuming Smith and Hickock helps investigators solve the Walker case, West hopes it brings the family and Sarasota-area community some peace.

"They seem to think they may have a connection, and they may well have," West said. "If digging them up can help them see if DNA evidence may help them, I don't want our taxpayers to pay for it, but if Florida wants to pay for it they can. I think all of the cold cases should be solved."

<p><em>LANSING, Kan.</em> - The final clues to the murder of a Sarasota County family, a crime unsolved for 53 years, may have been hidden underground 1,300 miles away.</p><p>Tuesday morning, what detectives hope will be the key to the Walker family murders was pulled from the cold ground of Mount Muncie Cemetery.</p><p>Sarasota detectives arrived in Lansing on Sunday, in time for a Leavenworth County judge to sign an exhumation order on Monday. The order cleared the way for Florida and Kansas authorities to dig up the bodies of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, collecting DNA evidence that could link the men — the central characters of Truman Capote's true-crime classic "In Cold Blood" — to the murders of an Osprey rancher, his wife and their two children. The Walker slayings took place 53 years ago today. </p><p>Investigators would not specify what they removed from the coffins, and said it would take weeks to determine if they have a match.</p><p>Capote's book depicts how Smith and Hickock killed another family, the Clutters, in Holcomb, Kan., and were executed in 1965.</p><p>The two criminals traveled through Florida a month after killing the Clutters. While the killers were traveling through the Sunshine State, Sarasota detectives found Cliff Walker, his wife, Christine, and their two toddlers shot in their home on Dec. 19, 1959.</p><p>Although the criminals claimed they were in Tallahassee at the time, detectives discovered that this alibi — the same version Capote later published — did not match evidence from records and witness testimony. Multiple witnesses also claimed they spotted Smith and Hickock in Sarasota and DeSoto counties around the time of the murders.</p><p>But Smith and Hickock were dismissed as suspects several months into the Walker murder investigation, based on fingerprint and polygraph evidence. The detectives moved on to other suspects, most of whom had ties to the Walker family.</p><p>Now, a Sarasota detective, Kimberly McGath, is raising questions about an unidentified palm print from the Walker home, and about the results of the polygraph tests done on Hickock and Smith.</p><p>McGath hopes DNA from semen left at the Walker home matches a sample pulled from a bone in one of the killers' coffins. A match could provide a long-sought answer to one of Sarasota County's most enduring mysteries. </p><p>"We're glad everything is proceeding," said Wendy Rose, spokeswoman for the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. "We are hoping it will lead to some results."</p><p>A quiet hilltop</p><p>The entrance to the cemetery was barricaded by Lansing Police Tuesday morning during the exhumation, limiting the access to the media and the public.</p><p>Police at the sceney handed anyone with questions a prepared statement from the cemetery, to explain the closure and apologize for the inconvenience.</p><p>Kyle Smith, deputy director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, said the KBI treated the exhumation as a crime scene, and wanted to control the area out of respect for families with loved ones buried in the cemetery. </p><p>Delaying the exhumation could have made the process more difficult, with the threat of cold winds and snow. But on this clear, warm December day, that problem was avoided. </p><p>Smith said the samples taken during the exhumation will be analyzed at a Kansas lab because they were collected under a Kansas search warrant. </p><p>"We are analyzing it as evidence of a crime, however that crime occurred in another jurisdiction. We are assisting the Sarasota, Fla., Sheriff's Office with evidence in our custody."</p><p>He declined to say what kind of bones were taken from the bodies to extract DNA, but said generally with older bodies it would be larger bones from a leg or hip.</p><p>The DNA analysis and comparison will take time.</p><p>"Ideally, the earliest is in a couple of weeks," Smith said. </p><p>Still, high hopes aside, the exhumation does not assure that the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office will get the evidence it needs for a DNA comparison. </p><p>"It's possible that you might be getting something useful from the bodies, but it's not guaranteed," said Dr. Erik Mitchell, the coroner for Leavenworth County.</p><p>Even if analysts find viable DNA, there is always the chance that the material from the Walker murder scene will not match Smith or Hickock.</p><p>A Hitchcock night</p><p>The two killers were hanged in a Lansing prison warehouse on April 14, 1965, after five years of appealing the death sentence they received for murdering the Clutter family. </p><p>The death row cells where Smith and Hickock waited, stalling their gallows appointments and talking with Capote, no longer exist. The building was torn down years ago, although the razor-wire still encloses one of Leavenworth County's four major prisons. </p><p>The prison warehouse is still standing, though a new storage room and stacked furniture inside give no indication of the gallows that once loomed in a corner. The undertaker, Davis Moulden, was still in mortuary school when he saw Smith and Hickock hang there. </p><p>"I had never been to an execution," said Moulden, the 84-year-old funeral director of Davis Funeral Chapel, a Leavenworth family business since 1855. Capote also was among the guards, officials and reporters who all witnessed Smith and Hickock's execution.</p><p>"We didn't know who Capote was," Moulden said. "He hadn't done anything. We could care less." </p><p>Sitting on a couch in the foyer as funeral bells chimed, Moulden remembered the heavy mist that rolled in on the night of the execution, not the downpours in the 1967 "In Cold Blood" movie. "It looked like an Alfred Hitchcock night," Moulden said.</p><p>Moulden parked a Buick hearse by the wall of the warehouse as a prison car drove by carrying Hickock, bareheaded and seated between two prison guards in the backseat.</p><p>"I had the parking lights on," Moulden recalls. "Whether or not Hickock saw that hearse nobody will ever know."</p><p>The car pulled up to the warehouse. Later, the executioner pulled the lever that triggered the hanging.</p><p>"We heard the trap open up, it was very loud," Moulden said. "And Hickock went down."</p><p>Moulden helped pull a funeral cot behind Hickock's body while a guard cut the rope around his neck. They moved the cot into the hearse and Moulden drove a few miles down the road to the funeral chapel in Leavenworth.</p><p>With no partition between the front seat and the back of the hearse, Moulden recalled that Hickock's feet were just behind his own head. At the parlor, a doctor arrived to remove Hickock's corneas, which he had asked to donate.</p><p>The bodies, unclaimed by the families, were placed in "plain Jane" coffins paid for by the state. The state also bought the plots in the so-called "singles section."</p><p>"I think that family needs some closure, the one in Florida," Moulden said. "If that means digging them up to get DNA, then I think they should."</p><p>'A good salesman'</p><p>The exhumation was not the first time the killers' graves have been disturbed. </p><p>In the 1980s, the embedded, flat headstones that Capote had bought the men were stolen on a lark from the small plots they marked in Mount Muncie Cemetery. The replacement stones where encased in a concrete base.</p><p>Twenty years later, a KBI agent heard that the original markers were being used as stepping stones leading to an old farm shed. After brushing the snow off the stones, the agents pried them from the frozen ground in Iola, Kan.</p><p>The recovered stones were turned over to the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka, which briefly displayed them before surviving members of the Clutter family objected and asked that the display be removed. The museum also has the dismantled gallows, an item hidden in its collection.</p><p>Nearly 400 miles west of Lansing, the murder of wealthy farmer Herb Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and two children has faded from many memories, with old people gone and new people moving into Finney County. But they are often reminded it is the setting for "In Cold Blood," a story that has reverberated for decades and extended far beyond Kansas. </p><p>While traveling in Indonesia with his wife, longtime Garden City resident Duane West, now 81, met a man from Australia at a museum. </p><p>"He told us, 'The only thing I knew about Kansas was 'In Cold Blood,'" West said.</p><p>Pulling out his business card — "Duane West, attorney-at-law" — West explained he was the chief prosecutor for the trial.</p><p>"There's lots of things I disagree with, but I have to give him credit for being a good salesman," West said, referring to Truman Capote. "I think it's stupid to have all these English departments require reading it; Harper Lee's book \ is the one they should read."</p><p>West was the person who decided to ask Smith and Hickock's jury for the death penalty. </p><p>If exhuming Smith and Hickock helps investigators solve the Walker case, West hopes it brings the family and Sarasota-area community some peace.</p><p>"They seem to think they may have a connection, and they may well have," West said. "If digging them up can help them see if DNA evidence may help them, I don't want our taxpayers to pay for it, but if Florida wants to pay for it they can. I think all of the cold cases should be solved."</p>